The Last Shogun

The Last Shogun - The Life of Tokugawa Yoshinobu

When Commodore Matthew Perry brought his squadron of "Black Ships" into Tokyo Bay, the world imagined that at last Japan had been "opened." After two and a half centuries of determined self-isolation from the rest of the world, it seemed the process of modernization was inevitable. In Ryotaro Shiba's account of the life of Japan's last shogun, however, Perry's arrival off the coast of Japan was merely the spark that ignited the cataclysm in store for the Japanese people and their governments. It came to its real climax with the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, the event which forms the centerpiece of this book. The Meiji Restoration-as history calls it- toppled the shogunate, and brought a seventeen year old boy emperor back from the secluded Imperial Palace in Kyoto to preside over what amounted to a political and cultural revolution...